1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data transfer circuit and a data transfer control method for use with a disk array system in which data is stored in a plurality of disk units in a distributed fashion so as to conduct reproduction or playback of the stored data.
2. Description of the Related Art
As a conventional technology related to a data transfer circuit and a data transfer control method for a disk array system, there has been known, for example, the JP-A-2-236714 entitled "Array-Type Disk Drive Mechanism System and method". According thereto, data is distributed to be stored in a plurality of disk units. To implement a high-speed transfer of data, there is employed a primary microprocessor executing operations at a high speed. The microprocessor controls data transfer in a segment unit, for example, in a 512-byte unit.
In a case where the speed of data transfer to and from an upper-level apparatus is desired to be increased, if the data control is achieved by the primary microprocessor for each data transfer in the segment unit, there will appear an overhead time due to processing of the microprocessor and hence the data transfer efficiency of the internal bus will be lowered. When the size of data transferred to and from the upper-level apparatus is similar to that of the data segment, the overhead time hardly exerts influence upon the data transfer speed. However, when the former is increased, the overhead directly becomes to be a bottleneck in improving the speed of data transfer to and from the upper-level apparatus.